Game changers?: multilingual learners in a cape town primary school

• Caroline Kerfoot ^[1] ; Basirat Olayemi Bello-Nonjengele ^[2]
  1. [1] Stockholm University

     Stockholm University

     Suecia

     
  2. [2] University of the Western Cape

     University of the Western Cape

     City of Cape Town, Sudáfrica

     
• Localización: Applied linguistics, ISSN 0142-6001, Vol. 37, Nº 4, 2016, págs. 451-473
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen

  • This article engages with Bourdieu’s notion of field as a ‘space of play’ to explore what happens to the educational field and the linguistic regimes operating within it in a site in which new discourses and practices of identity, language, ‘race’, and ethnicity become entangled with local economies of meaning. The context is a primary school in a low-income neighbourhood in Cape Town, South Africa. We draw on multilingual classroom and playground data from observations, interviews, and audio-recorded peer interactions among Grade 6 learners to illuminate the strategic mobilization of linguistic repertoires in encounters across difference: as identity-building resources and as means of shaping new interaction orders, restructuring hierarchies of value, subverting indexicalities, and sometimes resignifying racial categories. We further draw attention to a set of circumstances in which local actors have the potential to change, not only the rules of the game, but the game itself.